Thursday, June 11, 2015

A new video shows the dramatic cost of kids specializing in one sport too early.
“Play”
— you can watch it below — features Bev Smith, a member of the Canadian
Basketball Hall of Fame and former coach of the University of Oregon
Ducks’ women’s basketball team. Smith expresses concern that
specialization makes kids games too serious. “You start focusing on the
outcome, rather than the process,” she says in the video.

Vancouver’s
Jeff Angus is one of three graduate students at the University of
Oregon who produced the video (the others are Ryan Hagen and Alex
Morrison). He said that the video is intended to show that early sports
specialization “has played a large part in the demise of youth sport in
American and Canada.”

The topic, according to Angus, isn’t getting
the attention it deserves. “Almost every single professional athlete
played a number of sports growing up. In fact, in our research we didn’t
come across a single professional athlete who focused solely on one
sport before the age of 12,” he said.

“Specialization has a huge
cost on society, from injuries and burnout at a young age to kids
developing into less successful and productive people in adulthood. It
is also contributing to the obesity epidemic by way of a steady decline
in sport participation numbers.”

The video includes clips of Allen
Iverson (who played in the NBA) playing football, Jimmy Graham (who
plays football for the Seattle Seahawks) playing basketball, and Kobe
Bryant and Steve Nash, two NBA all-stars, playing soccer. It calls for
more stories about “athletes who played and who play”.

Angus wants everyone to see “Play”. “The
changes that need to be made can’t come from policy. And they can’t
just come from the grassroots level, either,” he explained. “It must
involve both sides of the spectrum.